Real Estate Fraud: A Worldwide Phenomenon

Real estate fraud is a worldwide phenomenon and Costa Rica is no exception. Highly sophisticated criminal organizations specialize in illegal real estate transactions, causing very large, unrecoverable losses to property owners.

Despite a series of important reforms implemented by the Public Registry to protect real estate from illegal transactions, real estate thieves deploy increasingly sophisticated operation methods.

Real estate fraud now has the trademark of corrupt notaries and their accomplices, working outside the Public Registry. News headlines confirm every day the magnitude of this growing threat.

Some recently reported cases include:

1. OIJ captures false lawyer on real estate fraud charges (La Nación, November 30th, 2006)
2. Notary is arrested for presumed real estate fraud (Telenoticias, Channel 7, May 8 2007)
3. Eight gangs work on real estate fraud (La Nación, May 19th, 2006)

Title Insurance Is Not Enough.

In order to protect themselves against real estate fraud, many property buyers use title insurance services offered by different companies.

While title insurance guarantees that the property has no liens or "complications" at the moment of purchase, it offers no protection from then on.

As a matter of fact, until now no company on the market provided a service that offered permanent protection of registry title integrity, giving property owners the security that no transaction would take place without their previous knowledge and approval.

The only option was to periodically (monthly or bi-weekly) check the property registry. As a result, owners often found out that their real estate had been illegally sold only when it was already too late to stop the transaction.

At that point, the owner could go to court and sue for damages, but chances of recovering his property were by then gone.

Insecurity was the name of the game for property owners. Simply, there was no technology and no company that could provide them with more effective and timelier protection.

Protection Against Real Estate Fraud

This emptiness ceased to exist with the creation of Private Property Registry and its exclusive, patented service of Registry Title Protection, a comprehensive system to prevent real estate fraud.

This technology features daily auditing of all annotations in the Public Registry and the possibility of performing preventive checks, dissuasion methods and legal proof.

Owners of real estate in Costa Rica, whether they reside in the country or not, are therefore the first in the world to enjoy the security provided by this comprehensive registry title protection system.

To achieve this, PPR signed a contract with the Public Registry that allows it to provide this complementary security service, akin to a “second lock” to keep real estate thieves out of the Public Registry.